10 Trends That Are Changing Cities Forever

When it comes to technology and strategy, government is often behind the times, and far behind the most innovative businesses. It's slow-moving, risk-averse, and subject to many electoral and legal constraints.

Cities, on the other hand, move much faster. That was the subject of a recent panel hosted by SAP and the Brookings Institute, what Sean O'Brien, the Global Vice President Of Urban Matters and Public Security at SAP called the "secret sauce" of the best-run cities.

Part of cities' success in innovation is building partnerships with large businesses. For example, SAP Urban Matters just announced a partnership with Boston to bring advanced enterprise software and analytics into the government.

The fact that two of the panelists, Bill Oates of Boston and Chris Moore of Edmonton, serve as the Chief Information Officers of their cities shows how far we've come.

The massive trends that define business right now — mobility, engagement, big data, and innovation — in the face of economic hardship are defining our most innovative cities, and it's going to change the way we live.

Engaging people through their smartphones

For corporations, the challenge is engaging employees and customers; for cities, it's engaging everyone who lives there. Services don't work when people don't or can't request them, and giving them easier avenues to do so can be a game changer.

Just like businesses, cities are using mobile applications to do this. Boston takes it one step further, publishing requests to get the community involved and to make the government accountable.

"We rolled out our first mobile application, Citizens Connect, back in 2009. It's not revolutionary now to find mobile apps that help you report a pothole or a streetlight, but back then we did it with a little twist," Oates said. "We didn't create that application purely to connect the citizen to city government; we also made sure that that individual was publishing their request ... to the community."

Oates told a story about a citizen who reported an animal at the bottom of a trashcan using the mobile app. Another citizen saw the request, released what turned out to be a possum, and tweeted the results back to the city.

The investment in the app has paid dividends. "We now take 20 percent of the service requests through that mobile channel," Oates revealed.

And just like a corporation, cities are using those apps to get data and improve services. "This data of who's reporting and where they are and how quickly we respond and all of those things are important data elements for us managing the city more effectively," Oates said.

One of the hottest new trends in business is gamification. It's only in its early stages even among cutting-edge companies, but cities are already starting to adopt it very rapidly, as Edmonton CIO Chris Moore explained.

"In the new year, we're launching a Facebook game around traffic and safety," Moore said. "Our Office of Traffic and Safety has been working with a local company that does games."

Though Moore claimed Edmonton's drivers are quite courteous, they can always do better, and games are effective because they have an element of competition that makes them compelling, and rules that make them easy to engage in.

Moore thinks that the possibilities extend far beyond the one Facebook game. "If we can think about how to think of our cities as games — not making light of them or making them juvenile, but approaching them like a game — we would bring a whole new level of conversation," Moore argued.

Another part of gamification is providing incentives and rewards for desired behavior. According to CIO Bill Oates, Boston has tested a very innovative approach to the sometimes ineffective community meeting.

We've played with a pilot of a project called Community PlanIT, which actually comes out of the work of a professor at Emerson college," Oates said.

"The issue here was how community meetings can run well. Very often the end result is not where you'd like it to be," Oates said. "What Community PlanIT does is use some level of gaming to educate people on what the issues really are. Sometimes at those community meetings you have some people who understand the issue and a whole bunch who really don't, and they're just listening to banter back and forth. It rewards people who are learning things and contributing. It gives them an ability to use what they've learned to now vote on some of the alternative solutions that may come up."